Food for thought for Christians

[Walt Zingmatilder]

.   

When confronted with such a badly disordered, non-functioning intellect allied to a near pathological mendacity what choice is there therefore but to ignore it?

Use the pretext of talking to others to bravely sneek in sly but offensive digs while taking the piss out of forum etiquette and rules, perhaps, Hillside?

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Of course we can, Vlad.

Since we know that your claim and that of Stephen's friend differ in respect of the divinity of Jesus there is nothing to stop us teasing out a method, with your help, of comparing different claims of personal experiences of the divine. I happy for you to set out your method and we'll go from there, since presumably you have some basis for preferring your personal experience to that of Stephen's friend: don't you?.

Gordon, we need to separate that which is claimed direct religious experience from  that which is philosophically and intellectually assented. Anything else is a typical antitheist category fudge and mudge.

While I am waiting for you to recruit someone who isn't another antitheist I am moving my activities onto the one thread. Since being on many doesn't seem to be helping Bluehillside's condition.

[ProfessorDavey]

Do objective truths have to be experienced? I don't know.

By definition objective truths remain true even when not experienced. So they might or might not be experienced, but that is irrelevant to their veracity.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Prof,

By definition objective truths remain true even when not experienced. So they might or might not be experienced, but that is irrelevant to their veracity.

But ontological naturalism precedes I move conjure up you can't disprove it methodological of course as as Popper put it wibble wibble why are you all being so horrible to me nurse nurse, I'm sitting in a damp patch again... 

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Prof,

But ontological naturalism precedes I move conjure up you can't disprove it methodological of course as as Popper put it wibble wibble why are you all being so horrible to me nurse nurse, I'm sitting in a damp patch again...

Gordon, can we have a smiley which is smiling, er, benignly?

[Gordon]

Gordon, can we have a smiley which is smiling, er, beningly?

Good idea, seriously Vlad, perhaps there are options we can look out re. different smileys - I'll check it out.

I'd like to see a 'can we all calm down a bit' smiley, since sometimes exchanges here can get a little fractious and folk get preoccupied to the extent we can't see the wood for the trees: I suspect we all guilty at times (me included)!

[Étienne d'Angleterre]

But you can also be right about it hence my statement about the unreliability of the unreliability of experience.
Hillside may if he chooses to do so remember our discussions about what I called his dependence on the psychological incompetence of humanity.

[quote/]

I don't deny you could be right. You could also be wrong. How can we tell?

However so far such psychological incompetence is a dogmatically held position and when pressed its support comes at base from ontological naturalism confused as methodological naturalism i.e. medical science. Given this I am justified in a demand for proof of the objective truth of ontological naturalism. This is never touched on and avoided giving antitheists the air of 'shut up theist Pig dog, ve ask ze questions around here''

Since it is you who makes the claims you are obviously the one that is going to get the questions.

As for the first part can you define your terms here please?

[Étienne d'Angleterre]

The trouble is Gordon is that without Stephen's friend we cannot assess the similarity of religious experience or whether his friend has had a personal divine revelation of jesus non divinity or whether he merely holds that philosophically.

The problem is your generalisation AND SIMPLIFICATION AND YES shoehorning to fit your approach.

Well we are asked to take you word for it that you have had a personal revelation of God. Actually no one has said they believe you to be insincere just how do you know you are not mistaken. I see you won't extend that courtesy to others though.

And you haven't' answered my other question (this is third time of asking). Do you really no accept that there are other people out there who have deeply held personal beliefs based on experience of God that are mutually exclusive to yours?

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Well we are asked to take you word for it that you have had a personal revelation of God. Actually no one has said they believe you to insincere just how do you now you are not mistaken. I see you won't extend that courtesy to others though.

And you haven't' answered my other question (this is third time of asking). Do you really no accept that there are other people out there who have deeply held personal beliefs based on experience of God that are mutually exclusive to yours?

At present I can not give you my experience. I can give you my analysis.
What I am saying is part of experience is the switch from investigation to personal involvement. It is your own investigations and involvement you should concern yourself with, I kind of but kind of don't understand a refusal to explore this further.....for yourself of course.
I still don't know whether your friends holding of Jesus as not God is derived from direct personal revelation or whether it is essentially held as you hold it but in an intellectually Jewish idiom.
You keep shutting this line of investigation, why?

[bluehillside Retd.]

Would it be fair to say - after all these months/years and countless times of asking for a method of any kind to distinguish his claims of the objective truth of his "god" from just guessing only to be met with a relentless refusal to answer or even to tell us why he won't answer - that Trollboy is telling us that his method cupboard is in fact empty: let's call it "method-dodging" for want of a better phrase?

I think it is fair.

Anyone disagree?   

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Would it be fair to say - after all these months/years and countless times of asking for a method of any kind to distinguish his claims of the objective truth of his "god" from just guessing only to be met with a relentless refusal to answer or even to tell us why he won't answer - that Trollboy is telling us that his method cupboard is in fact bare: let's call it "method-dodging" for want of a better phrase?

I think it is fair.

Anyone disagree?   

Methodology is not ontology Hillside. Methodology is an antitheist craze.

[bluehillside Retd.]

So now we know that Trollboy is in fact a method-dodger we can - as frankly we knew all along - agree that his personal "ontology" is just that - personal, as indeed is anyone else's personal ontology personal to him.

Shame really. Would have been fun watching him finally attempt to build a logical bridge from his "in my head, I had a funny feeling one day, because it meant a lot to me it must be real for you too, entirely subjective" god to a "here finally is a reason anyone else should take my claim seriously" god but I guess that'll never be.

Funny that.

[horsethorn]

Wow.

I've come back to the board after quite a while of very occasional visits, only to discover that Vlad's method-dodging has finally been exposed as such...

Not that it was ever difficult to see that that was what he was doing

Fascinating.

ht

[bluehillside Retd.]

Hey horse,

Wow.

I've come back to the board after quite a while of very occasional visits, only to discover that Vlad's method-dodging has finally been exposed as such...

Not that it was ever difficult to see that that was what he was doing

Fascinating.

Welcome back - you've been away far too long. As you can see, your people need you!

[Étienne d'Angleterre]

I still don't know whether your friends holding of Jesus as not God is derived from direct personal revelation or whether it is essentially held as you hold it but in an intellectually Jewish idiom.
You keep shutting this line of investigation, why?

I have answered it several times.

Here we go for another time:

(Before we go though I am proceeding along the lines that you equate experience of God with revelation of God. You use the former in your case and the latter in my friends case, so I will continue assuming you use them interchangeably)


You have a revelation of God. This best fits the Christian narrative. You therefore accept a divine Jesus.

He has a revelation of God. This best fits the Jewish narrative. He therefore does not accept a divine Jesus. If he thought there was a divine Jesus the Jewish narrative would not be the best fit to his experience.


[Further notes]

1)    I use narrative as a short hand version for you "linguistic framework, so feel free to change them as best suits you]

2)    Ignoring my friend, do you really think there are no Jewish people who believe they have a direct personal experience of God? Unless people who do are all lying the question remains, of how we know if your or their or any personal revelation is reliable.

[horsethorn]

Hey horse,

Welcome back - you've been away far too long. As you can see, your people need you!

I can't promise a lot of posting time - I changed role at in March, so I'm busy learning stuff - but I'll be online if you want to message me with any threads that could be interesting; as you can imagine, I'm unlikely to have time to catch up on all the current live threads

ht

[jjohnjil]

And you weren't christened, nor went to weddings/funerals in churches. At school you didn't have assemblies which were mini christian services with a hymn and christian prayers. The RE syllabus wasn't almost exclusively about christianity. You didn't end up endlessly bored on a Sunday because the pervading culture defined that Sunday was for church so shops, restaurants, cinema, sports, etc etc were closed - even pubs in some places.

I was growing up a couple of decades after you and although I'd agree that the proportion of people who attended church services was relatively low there was a rather all pervading christianity which was deeply embedded in society and in standard upbringing for most children.

I agree Christianity was the basic theme underlying society but no one where I lived thought twice about it. 

I think WW2 destroyed any faith the vast majority of the people of London had in God, when they had bombs constantly raining down - despite all the prayers being offered up.   

[Shaker]

I agree Christianity was the basic theme underlying society but no one where I lived thought twice about it. 

I think WW2 destroyed any faith the vast majority of the people of London had in God, when they had bombs constantly raining down - despite all the prayers being offered up.

On both sides of the English Channel at that.

[jeremyp]

Wow.

I've come back to the board after quite a while of very occasional visits, only to discover that Vlad's method-dodging has finally been exposed as such...

We all knew it before, it's just that, only  now is he being called out on it explicitly.

[ProfessorDavey]

I agree Christianity was the basic theme underlying society but no one where I lived thought twice about it. 

Perhaps so, but that doesn't stop it being the predominant undercurrent. Vlad's view is that the predominant undercurrent was secular humanism but I don't think that is the case. To put it in rather simplistic way - when I was growing up there were two main groups of people, practising christians and non practising christians, often considered to be 'lapsed'. There were a few very rare 'others' - active members of other religions and some who were overtly non religious, but they were as rare as hen's teeth. So the default accept view was that you were either a christian who went to church or a christian who didn't go to church any more (or even ever!).

[jjohnjil]

Perhaps so, but that doesn't stop it being the predominant undercurrent. Vlad's view is that the predominant undercurrent was secular humanism but I don't think that is the case. To put it in rather simplistic way - when I was growing up there were two main groups of people, practising christians and non practising christians, often considered to be 'lapsed'. There were a few very rare 'others' - active members of other religions and some who were overtly non religious, but they were as rare as hen's teeth. So the default accept view was that you were either a christian who went to church or a christian who didn't go to church any more (or even ever!).

Prof

Vlad's use of 'secular humanism' is his way of saying non-religious.  Those terms are comparatively new (or at least in the sense of general use) so I doubt if he had ever heard of them in his younger days.

Yes, the undercurrent was Christian just as it is today.  The difference is that pre-WW2, there was no way the general population - who I think were as non-religious as today) could voice their views.  Now we have forums like this on the Internet, it isn't simply a guy in a dress standing high above a passive congregation who has all the say.

Shaker

You're right, I'm pretty sure most of the German people were praying just as hard as the Brits and came out of WW2 with the same feelings re-God as we had.

[Hope]

Yes, the undercurrent was Christian just as it is today.  The difference is that pre-WW2, there was no way the general population - who I think were as non-religious as today) could voice their views.  Now we have forums like this on the Internet, it isn't simply a guy in a dress standing high above a passive congregation who has all the say.

That would seem to conflict with what my father used to say.  As a historian, he reckoned that the tipping point came with the end of the 1st World War.

[Shaker]

That would seem to conflict with what my father used to say.  As a historian, he reckoned that the tipping point came with the end of the 1st World War.

Even if it were true that that marked a tipping point, which I don't know is the case, it certainly marked quite a lengthy and widespread boom in spiritualism, seances and the like - Arthur Credulous Conan Doyle was caught up in it in a big way. But then he was also taken in by fairy pictures cut out of magazines and stuck into the ground with hatpins, so that says it all really.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Even if it were true that that marked a tipping point, which I don't know is the case, it certainly marked quite a lengthy and widespread boom in spiritualism, seances and the like - Arthur Credulous Conan Doyle was caught up in it in a big way. But then he was also taken in by fairy pictures cut out of magazines and stuck into the ground with hatpins, so that says it all really.

With all due respect Victorian spiritualism is a halfway house between traditional Christianity and a scientific materialism. OliverLodge stand as some one whose energy research is influenced by the concept of spirit and of course we mustn't forget ectoplasm.......spiritualists nod to materialism and scientific evidence.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

So now we know that Trollboy is in fact a method-dodger

You are the one who refuses to give a methodology for what you believe ontologically while demanding one from somebody who has already admitted he may not have one.

Alas, for you though, methodology is not ontology.